Should homeschooled children be required to sit for state exams to ensure minimum competency in reading and math? And what should happen if they fail? Indiana University School of Education professor Robert Kunzman, who studies homeschooling, proposes in the journal Theory and Research in Education that states require a basic skills test for homeschoolers.

Seconding Kunzman’s article, Miller-McCune magazine asks, with as many as 2 million students currently being homeschooled, whether ”it might be time to consider some sensible oversight.” In theory, the magazine notes, a required basic skills test “could be a useful tool to help homeschooling parents understand which areas their child is excelling and struggling in and, if constructed properly, could illuminate where to focus additional attention.”

Above all, it’s essential that the test be crafted by individual states (just as individual states create tests for public schools in compliance with federal testing mandates) and be viewed as “neutral” (evolutionary science off-limits?) by parents and students. Then perhaps local homeschool organizations could work with the state to create a skills assessment that contains no ideological or moral “litmus test.” The result, as Kunzman conceives it, “would involve computation skills (adding, subtracting, multiplication, division) and reading comprehension.” In other words: a simple, rudimentary, noncontroversial test that even a serviceably educated student could pass.

Even that won’t be simple, however. At the website Homeschooling Research Notes, Milton Gaither, a professor at Messiah College sees several problems with Kunzman’s proposal:

First, he is not clear about exactly when these tests would need to be administered or what would happen if a student failed them. By what age must a child be able to read, write, and cipher? For some unschoolers such skills are not deliberately taught until a child wants to learn them, which could be as late as 10 or 12. Such children would fail the Iowa test of Basic Skills, perhaps repeatedly. What then? Kunzman says in a footnote that failure doesn’t mean kids should be forcibly placed in public schools, for they might do even worse there. All he says is that repeated failure shoud prompt “a closer look by the state into that particular homeschool context, the quality of instruction, and the needs of the student before deciding how best to protect his or her educational interests.” (p. 328) This I find unhelpful and vague. Why bother administering the test at all if there’s no clear consequence for failing it?

Kunzman’s website has a lot of interesting information and resources about homeschooling (his state-by-state chart of homeschooling regulations is fascinating). While I understand the impulse behind his proposal–he points out we really have no objective information about how homeschooled students truly perform academically–but I think it’s unlikely that many, perhaps even most, homeschoolers will see mandated testing as anything other than an unwarranted intrustion. “The underlying assumption of this proposal seems to be that the citizen is somehow subject to the standards set by the state,” writes one homeschooling blogger. “Or perhaps that the state has a more compelling interest in the well being of the child than the parent. As any homeschooling parent can tell you, we don’t need a test to tell us how our child is doing. They are not a name on a roster, they are our focus of attention.”

In short, prepare for a fight. Given the relatively low performance of most states, it will also be hard to make a credible case that they know best or are even minimally competent to gauge, let alone assure academic success.